Owning a cat relies on give and take.
I give the beans a tiny squeeze and
she takes a chunk of my skin.

A fiery *****
She knows to trade
She wants to grow
Extreme havoc
Follows her wake
Beginning to suffuse
A relationship with honor
Sustainable fixings
An eternal gift
The purity of a partner,
With emotions
The wave of the divine
Heals

Tonight I traded my sleep.
Not for a meal or precious gem,
but to spend the night bleeding ink.
Unlike insomnia, I shunned sleep
when she needed to nest in my head.
sleep came early, I just wasn't ready.
A quick view in the hand mirror,
confirmed I looked a retired drunk.
But yet my weary eyes paid no heed.
I sat with transfixed watery eyes,
seriously glued to my laptop's screen.
With Several drunken-like nods,
and series of clumsy near falls,
sleep crept back from whence it came.
So the products of a sleepless night,
are these lines bled from my ink.

IvanBrooksPoetry

I can rewire
everything about myself.
I can reshape
every facet to fit your pieces,
but why would I?
I'll tell you. I forget my worth.
Did I ever have worth, anyway?
Did you ever hold it, either,
to be fair. What's anyone worth?

I can rewire
every aspect and affect.
I can reshape
every facet to fit your tropes,
but why would I,
when you don't seem to fit my soul?
Can you ever change that? You can.
I know it full well. I know it first
hand. It hasn't been worth it.

What's the weight of a goodbye,
when tasked to tell someone you love?

What's the weight of a sharp knife,
when used to cut tangential lines?

What's the wait on a goodbye,
when its utterance will free you?

I am a farmer at sea
60 sheep, 100 pigs,
geese and ducks on departure

These are frugal rations
with the stew, army bread and beans
No need to slaughter

The beasts just die
so there is always meat
for the cook and the officers

high above my smelly stable
where I haul in the buckets from the sea
and scrub the **** through the scuppers

In the bunks, it is worse
There is the world of the below deck
of sweat, exhaust gases, and the rasping sick

where you sink asleep in a pit
full of poo and ***, gasp for air
and throw up brown tar

Man y'all **** me off
But I wouldn't trade any of this for any amount
And honestly sometimes I wish I would

I dream a dream of skill,
I gather pictures of best practice
(methods best enacted off the couch.)
I house,
crisp corners, soaring beams and posts
where gawkers marvel, ‘cos
the high is feeling good. I see
the woods
and watch the owners.
(What good grip they have! enough to claim
what they could never care for-
let the lessers sing their lives!)
I drive a drive
not fast enough for fastness-makers,
flaunting logos, polished chrome,
I drive a loan.

None say it, none will ever hear
these soft confessions to
the “here” I hold right now
in its un-good. I slip
a “should” on, halfway,
dumping it for snacks and cons -
I run for miles
to lose it on the lawn.

And as I break, I pause to
watch a bit to see how not to fail.
I land in jail. The wardens
never speak to me,
the only copy of the key
described in stories, but
they’ve scattered every page.
And every day I fail
to reconstruct it out of naught,
I age.